Want a new house? Then copy the Georgians

The house, le Corbusier maintained, should be a machine for living in. Yes, Frank Lloyd Wright said, but only if you think the human heart is no more than a fuel pump. Le Corbusier's architecture, at least in its mid-period, was inspired by the thrilling purity of new technology. 'L'avion accuse!' he wrote, suggesting the shortcomings of fussy, traditional architecture when compared to the clean, pure shapes of a Voisin-Farman biplane. But Frank Lloyd Wright, at least in his own mid-period, thought very differently. In his autobiography, Wright insisted: 'No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it.' Thus, the eternal conflict between technology and nature.

The Spanish make no very clear distinction between the words for sleeping and for dreaming, perhaps explaining a national tendency towards surrealism. In England, there is a clear distinction between house and home, perhaps explaining our tendency towards confusion in the matter of domestic architecture. The recent CABE Housing Audit, with its use of relatively objective survey techniques, has refreshed the debate about what a house should be. Entirely unsurprisingly, the audit found against gormless 'executive' houses laid on grim plots with muggers' alleys. It found against that bastard style of neo-modern often referred to as Docklands Pixie Shit. Conservative architects, including the happily named Robert Adam (founder in 1995 of the Popular Housing Forum, international spokesman for 'contemporary classical' design, master planner of Dukes Rise, Tadley Acres in Shepton Mallet and an occult influence on the Prince of Wales's Poundbury), came out in favour. Game over! We shall see.

As long ago as 1976, architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, himself once a modernist architect, was expressing doubts about le Corbusier's 'cauchemar of the skyscraper-in-the-park', which he said had provoked the most violent reaction among the very people who had first supported it: the architects and planners. z

Certainly, the le Corbusier diffusion line that appeared at, for instance, Roehampton may be a qualified failure. But le Corbusier's most ambitious project in this genre, the 1952 Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, is an official monument and is wildly popular with its residents. There is fierce competition for the few flats that come on to the market. I have stayed there and it is magnificent, heroic, an unambiguously inspiring example of what modern architecture can be. A perfect home, certainly... but with its 1,600 residents not, admittedly, much of a private house.

Pre-architecture, 'People used to live in caves,' wrote Stephen Gardiner, who died this month and who was from 1970 to 1993 this paper's distinguished architectural critic. But then the germ of ambition entered the central nervous system. Andrew Marvell knew that 'the Beasts are by their Denns exprest': comfort and expression entered the equation after we dragged our knuckles out of those caves. Not long after Marvell wrote his lines 'Upon Appleton House', circa 1650, the Georgian period began. All sensible debate about the house in England is hobbled by the magnificent inheritance from this fortunate era when, rarely, wealth and taste worked together progressively rather than as they do today, degenerately.

The basic principles of Georgian domestic architecture had been established in Marvell's day - 'Humility alone designs/ Those short but admirable lines' - but it was only the expansion of speculative building in the 18th century that made the achievement possible. In 1945, not without a touch of post-traumatic, demob Brideshead syndrome, John Summerson published his magnificent study, Georgian London. Here, Summerson explained the principles of what made Georgian houses so desirable. And it was nothing to do with bogus pediments or sash windows. It is everything to do with firm principles and a free interplay between public and private space.

The Georgian townhouse is built on a site that is typically a narrow strip. This economises on both the frontage and the road-building. The plan is invariably elemental with one room at the front and one at the back, no matter what the size, although the disposition and style of the staircase create variety.

There is an insistent verticality which almost always creates pleasing proportions and an enjoyment of windows that results in pleasant rooms flooded with light. Perhaps most significantly, educated builders or surveyors, rather than posturing architects, were involved.

Today, the annoying international clique of jetlagged starchitects has little to contribute to the argument about what a house should be. But what is certain is that expectations everywhere need to be raised. The garden city architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin wrote The Art of Building a Home in 1901. They said: 'There are so many directions in which improvement is needed ... the influences which our common everyday surroundings have upon our characters, our habits ... are often very much underrated.' Quite so: nothing raises or lowers the spirits quite so quickly as architecture.

The house of the future need no more be an imitation of le Corbusier than of Frank Lloyd Wright or of a Georgian jobbing builder. To copy any would be defeatist pastiche. Le Corbusier knew design was 'intelligence made visible'. Lloyd Wright knew you had to 'make the most of contemporary possibilities' and John Summerson knew that the Georgian house achieved its commodity and delight not through surface details, but through fundamental principles. Patrick Lynch of Lynch Architects, Young Architects of the Year in 2005, says the Georgian house succeeds because of a nice combination of 'rigorous construction and quite loose planning'.

I did Corb. I have stayed in a thrilling Mies van der Rohe weekend glass pavilion in Michigan. I have visited cosy arts-and-crafts masterpieces in the Cotswolds. I live in a tall, narrow, stucco-fronted, early-Victorian house, just in touch with the fag end of Georgiana.

What makes them all enjoyable is not surface affectation, not the calamitous Poundbury Effect, but design in depth, which means a building with a comfortable relationship to the site, good proportions, ordinariness and light. That's all a house needs to be.